(hypothetical) What would you ask Dave Nilsen?

[Dreadnought]

Cymew--

Thank you for the nice comments. You're right, it really was a big brotherhood in the game industry back then. We were all each other's biggest fans, and played each other's games all the time. One of my favorite events each year was this Con in Salt Lake City where I and two guys from White Wolf were the game guests of honor every year, and we'd have fun playing each other's games. Minion Hunter was our favorite. One of the big pleasures of the summer convention season was "sleazing" copies of games from other companies. Every GDW employee was allowed to trade one copy of each of our new products to guys at other companies to get their stuff. So you could run to FASA or West End or Steve Jackson and swap for their latest releases. The poor guys at Avalon Hill weren't allowed to do that by their parent company, so they always seemed to me to look a little sad.

I don't know that I'd say it was pure hell. Yeah, it kept us on our toes, we worked hard, but we were very fortunate to have such interesting jobs. One of the nice things about it was that you would never get bored. I could take a break from working on a wargame to edit a Challenge article, or write some TNS news items, or proof a Dark Con blueline, or write a Command Decision column, and then write a Traveller book. Granted, a lot of the time I wasn't really "taking a break" on purpose, I had to drop what I was doing to meet a deadline to get the Challenge article or the TNS articles done to send it to the printer, but it was never boring.

Were there ever Traveller translations into the Scandanavian languages? Or do you guys work with the English editions?

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Jame--

Yeah, there's just the one of me. Good? Bad? You make the call.

How did you become a blasphemer?

Q: If questions are still being taken, then: If you could (and wanted to) go change one thing about the background, what would it be?

That's a very interesting question, and I'm not sure. Do you mean change something we did while I was there? Or change anything?

I think I generally don't think along those lines, since you basically have to find a way to deal with what's been published and you can't just undo it. In general I think my answer would be something like tweaking a detail a little bit so it would fit better with a follow-on twist, or write a description a little differently to leave more room for a subsequent new idea. Just little tactical things like that.

I'll try to think about it, and if I think of anything I'll let you know.

I'm sure the question was mostly rhetorical, but since I'm here, Frank Chadwick was a founder and the president of GDW. He has been a major name in wargame and RPG design, and is still a big name in miniatures games, where I think he does most of his work today. He is a big Russophile, is very funny, and is in the Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame.

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Daryen--

Yes I am reading the follow-ups, and am attempting to reply to most/all of them.

You're very welcome. And don't sweat it. I appreciate the sincerity of your reply, and we all say things that we might rather have said differently.

Thanks for the "peek" inside the GT Hiver book. Maybe I'll open it up one of these days.

I'm especially happy for the remarks on RSB. I just kept cranking down the point size on that thing so I could fit more in. I think Frank thought I was crazy. Well, actually I know Frank thought I was crazy. That was the summer that I had to skip the convention circuit so I could stay in Bloomington and get RSB out. I remember a lot of long, dark, hot nights writing that, making all of the subsector maps on the art computer, digging through all of the old LBBs to make sure I didn't miss any details. That was the summer Mickey Mantle died, and one of my favorite college professors, outside Sarajevo. I can still feel a lot of that summer like it was yesterday.

I like to think that I put a lot of that depth in there deliberately,

but maybe you're thinking about something I'm not? If you don't mind sharing, what was some of the depth that you're thinking about that you enjoyed?

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Actually, today I remembered something, so I'm going to return to this question here:

Q10: What future products were already sketched out and or near completion at the time of GDW closure and would he consider bringing them out under the Quicklink banner (after some modification due to MJD's efforts)?

Some of the things that would have come out in fairly rapid order were a number of combat vehicle guides along the model of the RCVG. The reason for this is that every vehicle that was provided in Striker II had been designed in absolute detail using FF&S. Since S2 provided weapon penetration, armor values on all faces, ammunition supply, fuel endurance, and actual price in credits, etc., there was no way to "dummy up" or "rough out" those vehicles. Every single one of them was done all the way.

I think the first one might have been the Zhodani Combat Vehicle Guide, to keep supporting the Regency campaign, but then I think we would have pretty rapidly returned to the RC and publish all those Oriflammen armored vehicles, and the variety of Wilds AFVs as well.

But as I said earlier, the very next book would have been the Regency Starship Guide. It included variants on the 1000-ton Chrysanthemum and Fer-de-Lance DEs, plus TL 15 versions of just about everything published previously.

If I can ask a question of the people here, what did people think of the RCVG? I was really pleased that we were able to produce all of the CT grav AFVs from The Duke of Regina's Own Huscarles and the Spinward Marches Campaign in FF&S/TNE terms, and with illustrations for the first time as well, for almost all of them.

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Paul/doomhunk--

I have every confidence in the mission, Dave.

Thanks for that, and for the remarks on Survival Margin. Yes, I do believe it, because I still do too.

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Mike/Sigg Oddra--

You're very welcome. I will try to be available for follow-up questions as they come up.

Best,

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Elliot--

Err Why is Dave only a citizen Soc7 = Does his position justify noble elevation, if not ancient status?

Don't look now, but I've made it up to Soc-9! I'm a self-made man, and I'm going places!

Dave

 

[clementk]

Originally posted by LKW:
I say ye David Nilsen (aka Dreadnought if you haven't figured that out).

Scott Thompson (a nod to the hilarious Kids in the Hall comedian is my guess) for a while before that.

OK, who's next. Shall we start a "What would you ask Frank Chadwick?" discussion?

We could, it'd just need somebody to start the thread. While I'm not the biggest fan of his later miniatures rules design style, being a Piquet Heretic, he still has my respect. Great convention games too, 54mm esp. looks great at cons.

Oh and to DN, Survival Margin's one fine book. Thanks for deciding to post here and answer questions. Very interesting reading.

I don't have the Regency books or the TNE Aliens books but now I'm interested in hunting down copies when I get the chance.

Casey

 

[Rupert Boleyn]

If I can ask a question of the people here, what did people think of the RCVG? I was really pleased that we were able to produce all of the CT grav AFVs from The Duke of Regina's Own Huscarles and the Spinward Marches Campaign in FF&S/TNE terms, and with illustrations for the first time as well, for almost all of them.

That's one question I can't answer - for various reasons I never got round to buying the Regency material when GDW was in business (mainly tight budgets and more interest in the Coalition), and in the years since I never seem to have the money and the desire to track them down at the same time.

 

[GypsyComet]

It's really great to finally learn some of the "secret plans" for TNE. I do, however, have a question for you, Dave:

You've mentioned in the above posts that Virus was the most compelling candidate for "the reset", and that it makes for some major points of plot in resolving the Black Curtain War (or whatever you might have called that). Were you planning on following the effects of Virus further than that?
I ask because Vampire Fleets seemed to be on the path of not just "friendly" Virus-inhabited mechanisms, but Virus as a truly varied form of life that could bring Traveller "up to date" (so to speak) in the area of AI, making robots another PC race instead of oft-ignored hardware.

 

[Dreadnought]

Grognard & Sigg--

You're welcome. IBoB in GT or T20 or 1248 could be fun.

And now back to the questions.

Q: In your answer to the question about the RC vs Solee conflict you said to ask again as there may be more details.

Can you remember anything more about the conflict?


A: Yeah. What I was going to say is that the Solee subplot was one of those cool things that we discovered in the game, rather than it having been pre-plotted.

We knew that the RC was going to run across obstacles, such as opposing pocket empires or something, but we did not have the Solee in the plotline. What happened was that while working on Path of Tears, or whatever book had the "calculate the size of the fleet" equations, we discovered, "crap, these Solee guys will eat the RC's lunch."

That's one of the challenging and fun things about Traveller, is that there is SO MUCH dense detail in the game that stuff can be lying in wait for you all over the place, just waiting to be discovered. And the beauty of these "found" plot twists is that they freshen the plotline and give you a chance to do things in different ways. The showdown with the Solee would be a good challenge to the RC, and a good opportunity to start pulling in the notion of the "friendly" or "tame" virus strains to help them meet the threat.

Another example of the same sort of thing was the Schalli. You take a good look at the UWP and think, "this could be an aquatic race. Wonder what they'd look like." Neither the Solee nor the Schalli changed the overall thrust of the story arc, but they added color to it, and remind us that Traveller has a tendency to just write itself.

That's why I've always been a little bit leery of just publishing mass volumes of sector UWP data. There is SO MUCH information packed in those things that you can never be sure what it all means, or how it's going to come back around and do things that you didn't anticipate. And then there's the flipside of that. With so much possible detail and adventure in just a couple of star systems, what do you need a whole sector for? Stop and smell the tree krakens or something.

Dave
SOC-10 and rising!

 

[Dreadnought]

Okay, I'll take one out of order here:

Q: You've mentioned in the above posts that Virus was the most compelling candidate for "the reset", and that it makes for some major points of plot in resolving the Black Curtain War (or whatever you might have called that). Were you planning on following the effects of Virus further than that?
I ask because Vampire Fleets seemed to be on the path of not just "friendly" Virus-inhabited mechanisms, but Virus as a truly varied form of life that could bring Traveller "up to date" (so to speak) in the area of AI, making robots another PC race instead of oft-ignored hardware.


A: GypsyComet--

You are absolutely correct, that was one of our explicit intentions with Virus, to allow machine life forms, and get past the question of "is it alive or is it a program?" And then of course the very next step would be the chance to have PC machines.

The thoughts that we would have explored would have included PC starships like HAL, or Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang (I know, that was a tiny person in a vat, but it works the same). Another concept would have been a PC as a virus which could replicate itself across multiple hosts, most likely serially, in order to preserve the roleplaying experience, and not just keep copying itself over and over. That was part of the point behind the "meta-identity" vs. "point identity" concept in RSB, in addition to the notion of the psionic "possession" alluded to in my Empress Wave discussion.

I think your phrase "up to date (so to speak)" is quite apt, as Traveller felt kind of funny being so futuristic without the artificial life forms that are so common in science fiction. And virus would allow us to redress that almost at a stroke.

Obviously there would have been play balance limits on such PCs, as they would have been potentially very powerful, and really changed the feel of the game, but that was one of the directions we intended to explore.

I'll have to look at VF again, as I might be reminded of some more thoughts.

Dave

 

[GypsyComet]

I can try to to tell, at least partly, the story of Bari Z. Stafford. The dates are somewhat fuzzy at this point, however.

About five years ago now, the TML acquired a new denizen, who carried the handle "General Turokan", and who, almost from day one, posted in character. He touched a nerve the TML had not used in a while, and sparked some lively in-character discussions. In more ways than one, the General rescued the TML from its deepest case of "between editions doldrums" ever.

As the months went on, the General came out of his character shell, and we learned that he, Bari Z. Stafford in the real world, suffered from a progressive degenerative disease. When he had first joined the TML, looking to brighten his forced retirement with an old hobby, he was already fairly limited in his mobility. As time went on, his condition worsened, making even typing a long and laborious task. He kept it up, however, and even produced some amazing works on the Zhodani Core Expeditions and other aspects which fascinated him. The secret of the Empress Wave vexed him greatly, but didn't stop him.

He continued to work on his fascinations, and posted to the TML despite the great effort to do so, until his condition robbed him of all mobility. The TML received word of his death approximately two months after his last post there. His daughter thanked us, the Traveller Community, for keeping his final days bright.

In his honor, those of us who knew him have borrowed the Reformation Coalition's tradition of the messhall toast, and try at any significant gathering (like conventions) to lift a glass "To Absent Friends."

 

[Dreadnought]

Okay, last one for the night. Then I have to either go write my PowerPoint presentation, or go to bed and get up early to do so.

ChaserCaffey--

That is very interesting to hear you say that, and very gratifying to hear that in your case we "made the connection."

How did you get into Traveller? Did you do it on your own, reading the books and starting your own campaigns? Or did you have other friends who brought you into their games first?

I remember reading an early review of TNE when it came out in 93, where the reviewer said that we shouldn't have wasted so much space on explaining the concept of roleplaying to new players, "because the people that are going to buy this are people that already know all that." Well, no, that really wasn't our intent, to just keep selling to the same aging cohort. If the game couldn't bring in new players, we were all going to lose, because the game would die out. We really wanted to appeal to new players, and I'm happy to know in your case that it worked out, and gave you good memories.

But I see you have a question:

One question of my own- do you remember what was planned for the Guild in the future of the setting? Was it going to remain a perpetual enemy for low-level RC parties, or was the RC going to put them in their places at some point? As I recall, the Guild was holding the crews of two of the original ships hostage- was that intended to be the catalyst for an RC strike against the Guild?

A: The RC was going to have some large-scale run-ins with them, but was not going to take it out. The Guild was too decentralized for that to happen, and was too useful as you say, as a perpetual enemy in the campaign, source of intrigue, etc. You remember that creepy guy in Star Vikings? Brad McDevitt based his picture on Michael Corleone from the Godfather II. The RC would have had one or more run-ins with guys on his level, but that would not have eliminated the Guild threat overall.

And even the Guilded Lily Epic adventure was not intended to prove that the Guild as a whole was based on that Virus-infected shipyard in Diaspora. That was just that Virus organization taking advantage of the Guild as a vector for infection.

By the way, the way we came up with the concept for the Virus shipyard was based on all of the lines-of-communications maps I maintained. I had print outs from Atlas of the Imperium all taped together, and I'd marked all the Jump-1 mains on one of them (about 5 feet by 4 feet, I think) so we could identify all of the various communications choke points and thoroughfares. I also had one where I marked all of the Jump 2 connections in green felt tip. That one was actually more useful than the one that showed the Jump 1 mains, because it more clearly showed the real crossroads worlds, and the even more interesting isolated worlds. When I saw this one isolated world in Diaspora that had only one single Jump 2 connection to it, I knew that something cool had to live in there. So I built the Vampire shipyard there to be a challenge in Diaspora, and Frank harvested that idea for the Guilded Lilly epic.

Those maps are also how we came up with the Vampire Highway as well. Maps are really cool things. In real life we know that they show us things that we pretty much already understood. In fiction they allow us to discover things that we hadn't realized yet.

Dave

 

[Dreadnought]

Okay, I lied.

Thank you, GypsyComet, for the account of Bari Stafford. I'm sorry that he didn't get to live to learn the intent of the Empress Wave, but it sounds like it didn't prevent him from adding to the game in probably an even more real way, by touching his life to the lives of the others on the list. And I'd love to see what he came up with on the Core Expeditions.

I hope that the TML members remember Bari not just with sadness for a light that has gone, but also joy at the very special experience that they all took part in.

To absent friends indeed.

Good night, and God bless us, Every one.

Dave

 

[Hyphen]

Originally posted by David Freakin' Nilsen:
If I can ask a question of the people here, what did people think of the RCVG? I was really pleased that we were able to produce all of the CT grav AFVs from The Duke of Regina's Own Huscarles and the Spinward Marches Campaign in FF&S/TNE terms, and with illustrations for the first time as well, for almost all of them.

Dave

Loved it, even though I'm an MT grognard, rather than TNE. Especially liked the split of the Trepida into three types, plus the incorporation of the old Striker 20-ton tank (and the comments on the silly unarmed command variant). I love it when the old stuff is revamped and included in the new; that's why my fave TNE books are Survival Margin, the RSB, and the RCVG.

One question, tho': what was the inspiration for the slab-like G-carrier? I mean, the one that, side-on, looks like a trapezoid? Bad ASCII art follows:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> __________________
/ |
/ |
/____________________|</pre>[/QUOTE]I have an old Grenadier (I think) [Edit: Doh! it's from Martian Metals!!] model of a G-Carrier, and it is basically two trapezoids - in other words, the front slopes down to a point, then reverses. More bad ASCII art follows:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;"> _________________
/ |
/ |
\__________________|</pre>[/QUOTE]I just wondered if the artist had used an old picture as a reference point (Grenadier [Edit: Martian Metals!]advertised in early JTAS issues), but maybe the pic only showed the top half?

I know, minor question, not exactly the sort of thing you'd remember, but...


P.S. <shameless plug>If you're interested in Trav web sites, mine is Beowulf Down.</shameless plug>

 

[Uxi]

Good to see you up and resurfacing again, Dave. You, more than any other person, have made Traveller something I enjoy. You keep posting stuff like this that I can data mine and I'll have to let my TotJ Star Wars campaign lapse in favor of TNE once again.

I'm a new Traveller who started with TNE. To this day the older LBB stuff (Library data, Behind the Claw, etc) has always seemed kinda hokey, but I always appreciated it. Even if I had a good time bashing them on my fiery tirades on the old MPGN TML in defense of TNE.

What I loved the most in TNE was how everything is integrated, from the design system (FF&S) to the vehicle combat to the personal combat and ultimately to the ship level (BL) and fleet level (BR) level. Yes, sometimes it's not pretty but the gearhead in me relishes what I can do with my modified versions of Annti's spreadsheets and the epic scope of Traveller's immense history that's available for me to use... but that I wasn't dependent on.

Ironically, I've since acquired just about everything there is Traveller (everything for TNE, the entirety of GDW's MT and most of the DGP even the rare and expensive stuff) and more of the LBB's than I would have imagined...

My only question for now(as I tried to milk you for some of the answers you've since elaborated on when you briefly resurfaced on TNE-RCES) is also about the "feral" Ithklur and the nature of their independent state.

And there might be that hint about the past tense of the Hiver Federation not surviving, mentioned in passing in Ililek Kuligaan's "article" in NE17 (in Survival Margin)...

 

[Malenfant]

The thoughts that we would have explored would have included PC starships like HAL, or Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang (I know, that was a tiny person in a vat, but it works the same). Another concept would have been a PC as a virus which could replicate itself across multiple hosts, most likely serially, in order to preserve the roleplaying experience, and not just keep copying itself over and over. That was part of the point behind the "meta-identity" vs. "point identity" concept in RSB, in addition to the notion of the psionic "possession" alluded to in my Empress Wave discussion.

See, I love this stuff myself. (I've tried to push for PC Virus/machines in the 1248 playtest. Dunno if I've been successful or not..).

I've played an AI on a spaceship once before, in a Transhuman Space game - it was an interesting experience (TS also covers human-scale AI characters in general, which can have multiple bodies to occupy). It's nowhere near as powerful as you think, largely because you can usually only occupy one body at a time - either you're the ship, or you're a human- or vehicle-scale cybershell which may or may not be ideally suited to interacting with humans (and the plot). In one instance, my crew were in trouble in a station I was docked to, and there was little I could do as the ship other than try to hack the (dumb) station computer to try to gain control over access ports and life support and so on to try to help my comrades. I couldn't do much else because moving the ship or damaging the station would have jeopardised the safety of my crew, not to mention that it would have resulted in one hell of a repair bill too.

Sure, HAL could kill all of its crew, but most of them were in cryosleep anyway, and it only managed to kill one of the living ones before the other one found a way into the ship and disconnected HAL's higher brain functions. Which goes to show that AI characters certainly have their own vulnerabilities

.

(Odd... I used to refer to AIs as "he", now I refer to them as "it"!).

 

[Uxi]

Just don't limit yourself to one body. I've found the meta-identity concept EXTREMELY interesting ever since I got the RSB.

I almost exclusively Referee instead of play these days... but I've still had a blast with it.

I've made the "Burly Brawl" from Matrix Reloaded look like childs play.

 

[Antony]

Being a gearhead myself I love the RCVG. It was inspiration for many of my own designs. Including a TL11 Meson Gun Sled. Doesn't do a lot of damage but as no vehicles had meson screens the effects are quite good.

Though I think it was introduced by DGP the Scout Service Data Repository at Reference which is on the TNE map always struck me as something monumental for virus. Was their any intention to use this world in the metastory? Especially given that as explained virus often developed a character based on the systems it infected, a virus in the repository - a supergod virus?